For fans of Master Slave Husband Wife and Django Unchained comes the extraordinary forgotten story of an event known in its day as “the first shots of the Civil War,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels.
The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”
This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.
It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.
Aptowicz will be in conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, a professor of history at Howard University. Her research focuses on African-American history in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ohio and Kentucky. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. She served as the Chair of the Department of History from 2017-2023. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson. She is also the Principal Investigator of two institutional grants, including the $5 million Mellon Just Futures grant (2021) and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Grant ($480k in 2017).